Confessions of an Innocent Man
Page 2
I felt my knees start to buckle. I told her I was, and it took me some time to process her reply.
She said, I wanted to say this directly to you, not your waitstaff: I’ve never actually felt inclined to compliment a chef for a sandwich, but I must make an exception for this one. Everything about it is extraordinary. How do you manage to get a hint of lemon inside the filet?
I was paralyzed. I could not form the words to answer her. Benita came to my rescue. She said, He poaches it briefly in a Meyer lemon beurre blanc before moving it to the grill.
I stammered, Yes, that’s what I do.
Tieresse said, Well, I might never be able to eat red snapper again.
She smiled. Her teeth sparkled. Her eyes were two shades of green. I wanted to say more but could only manage, Thank you.
She held out her hand, and I shook it. She told me her name. I said, I know who you are, and I told her mine. She said, Well, Rafael Zhettah, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
I do not believe it is only in hindsight I am able to say I felt the magic right then, at that very first touch of her skin on mine, in the wake of words that surprised me yet that I immediately forgot.
I said, If you come back again it will be exactly the same.
And she said, Oh believe me. I intend to.
A month later, she was sipping a dirty martini on the La Ventana deck at half past five. I walked outside to check on her. She said she wanted to invest in me, and she asked whether I would like to open a bigger place.
I told her no. I liked my life. A bigger place would complicate it. The next day and the day after that, she asked again, and each time I said no. On that third day she said she understood, that she would not ask me anymore. The next day she came in again.
She said, I have a different question for you today.
I waited, surprised to realize I was nervous. She said, I apologize for prying. I asked Benita about your situation.
I felt my stomach lurch. My neck felt hot and damp. She asked whether I wanted to have a drink that evening after I closed. It was not the question I was expecting. I stood there mute.
She said, It’s okay. Never mind. I shouldn’t have asked.
I said, Yes I do. Very much. But we don’t close tonight until midnight.
She said, Perfect. I’ll see you then.
Tieresse had just turned fifty. She was nearly fifteen years older than I was. I had never been married. I had no children. I liked cooking, camping, reading, and canoeing. I lived like a graduate student. I had never known anyone like her. More money had slipped between the overstuffed sofa cushions in her den than I made in a year.
In other words, it was no surprise at all when, two years later, I was the first person police suspected when Tieresse was bludgeoned and killed. From the outside, I might have suspected me too. Being convicted, though, well, that was a different matter.
* * *
• • •
On our first date, Tieresse got to the restaurant a half hour before we closed and helped the busboys clear the final tables. I came out of the kitchen and saw what she was doing.
I said, Let me pour you a drink while we finish here.
She said, If I help out, you’ll finish here sooner.
She smiled and dropped a handful of utensils and two water glasses into a square plastic container.
Later that night we sat outside and shared a bottle of prosecco with a slab of local cheese and a loaf of warm sourdough. She told me about her son, Reinhardt, twenty-two at the time, doing graduate work in computer science at MIT.
She said, We talk nearly every night. He tells me what he is working on, and I don’t understand a word he says. I go to sleep smiling.
She asked whether I had children, and when I told her no, she asked whether I wanted them.
I said, Awfully intimate question for a first date, don’t you think?
She said, Yes, I do.
She said, Well?
I told her for better or worse, I was not much of a planner.
I said, Possibly I’m Buddhist at heart, but I’ve never dreamed about the distant future. Even here, I think about what I am serving that night, and whether we have enough traffic for me to meet the payroll at the end of the month.
She said, Well, I think you should.
I should what?
Dream.
Before she climbed into the back seat of a town car an hour before dawn, she hugged me and said, Can we do this again?
I said, I sure hope so.
That night I couldn’t fall asleep. Her words were ricocheting inside my brain. Yesterday there hadn’t been anything missing in my life, then she asked me what else I wanted, and I realized not that there was, but that she had asked me a question I should have thought about before. A friend I had known since I was in college wondered what had happened to me, how I had been so smitten so fast.
I said, I realize it makes no sense, but when you fall in love, if you do, you fall in love. That’s why it’s called that. Until it happens to you, it’s impossible to understand.
* * *
• • •
Valley Falls, Kansas, population fifteen hundred or so, straddles State Highways 4 and 16, thirty miles north of Topeka, in the northeast corner of the state. Four years before I opened La Ventana I had been renting a two-room apartment in Olathe, just south of Kansas City, where I was in flight school getting certified to fly twin-engine planes. My dad taught me how to fly his boss’s crop duster when I was a boy, and I had flown hundreds of hours, but I had never gotten around to getting my pilot’s license. Being a chef was option b; my dream job was to sleep under the stars. So I planned to start a company supporting rafting and kayaking excursions in remote parts of the West. We’d land on a dirt strip near the river’s put-in, and after spending the day on raging whitewater and exploring the canyons on foot, my clients would enjoy first-class catered meals. None of the other outfitters were doing it. But the investors I approached balked at the price of the insurance premiums and potential liability. My fledgling business never got off the ground. Yet I have no regrets. Flight training was its own reward.
One September day, on a cross-country training flight to Nebraska, my flight instructor pulled the power on both engines just south of the state line, simulating a double engine failure. I scanned the ground for a place to land. There are plenty of flat, treeless opportunities in Kansas, but not many are paved. I spotted what looked like an unused road and set the plane down there. The road was actually a mile-long driveway bisecting a hundred-acre wooded tract. It ended at what appeared to be a pasture of nothing.
My instructor congratulated me on both choice of spot and execution of the landing. We got out of the plane and walked around.
I said, Did you know this place was here when you pulled the power?
He said, I’ve never seen it before in my life.
* * *
• • •
During my sophomore year of college, I was on a second date with a girl I’d met in my accounting class. She was the youngest of eight siblings from a devout Mormon family. She sang in the choir and started the campus organization lobbying to end discrimination against same-sex couples. She asked about my family, and I told her. A few nights later I invited her to dinner again, and she demurred. I was surprised. I said, I’m disappointed. I thought we’d had a nice time. She said, You know, Rafael, there are times you should dole out truth sparingly.
If I’d learned my lesson, or been quicker to construct a lie, I might not have made the same mistake with Tieresse. It was our second date, too, when she asked me to tell her about my family. I told her I was an only child whose parents were dead. She asked how they died.
I said, My father was shot to death by Mexican drug agents during my freshman year of college.
Tieresse asked, He was a
drug dealer?
I said, If you ask the DEA, they will say he was, but that’s not exactly true. He was hired help. He flew a crop duster and sprayed the marijuana and cocaine crops with organic pesticides.
She said, There’s such a thing as that?
I said, I have no idea.
She asked, For how long?
I said, For as long as I knew him. He couldn’t read or write but he could fly in places only a crazy person would try. He wasn’t macho. He was responsible. He did it for his family.
And your mom?
I said, She died two weeks later. The death certificate says it was a stroke. She was diabetic and pretty overweight. But it was a broken heart. After we buried my papá, Mamá got into bed and didn’t get out.
Tieresse said, That’s awful. I’m so sorry. And she placed her hand on mine. She said, Tell me more about them.
So I did. When Mamá was eight months pregnant, Papá put her in his plane, flew low across the border, landed in Laredo, refueled, and left her there, standing on the tarmac. I was born two days later, six weeks premature. But I was an American citizen. He’d done what he set out to. After two months in the ICU of a charity hospital, with my mamá sleeping in a lobby chair or a homeless-shelter cot, I was healthy enough to go home. I’m not sure how he got word to Mamá, but he did, and one evening, Mamá bundled me up and paid a farmworker to drive us to a small airport, and Papá came and picked us up. With money he borrowed from his boss at an interest rate people in America would go to prison for charging, he’d bought my mamá Indian jewelry and a trunk of new clothes. Later he told me, Ella hace todo el trabajo duro. It wasn’t completely true. He did plenty of hard work. But he didn’t see it that way.
Every week he deposited a few pesos into a savings account he’d opened in my name at a bank in Dallas. When I was fourteen, he told me, Yo pienso que tú debes ir a la Universidad de Utah. Son amables con los mexicanos allí. I asked him how he knew they were nice to Mexicans in Utah. He said, Hijo, sé un montón de cosas.
I told Tieresse, He did know some things. How he knew the Mormons would welcome a poor Mexican I have no idea. And I still even have fond feelings for that first girlfriend, despite the fact she ditched me because she thought I might be Michael Corleone.
Tieresse said, Lucky for me.
She asked whether the Mormons had sawed off my Spanish accent. I told her I never had one. My mother had been an English teacher and spoke to me in English at home whenever my father was not around. They met when a bus carrying her students back to school after a field trip to the forest broke down on a rutted dirt road and my father landed his plane in a field and helped them get on their way. My mother had said, Hijo, I knew I wanted to marry him before I knew his name. She quit at the end of the school year and moved to the village where I grew up. They dated for two weeks. In their married life, the only nights they ever spent apart were when my mother was in Texas for me to be born.
She asked how I ended up in culinary school. I said, Because it was free, and I told her why.
I’d been working evenings at a downtown restaurant. I couldn’t believe how much food we threw away. I told Tieresse, It wasn’t rotten or spoiled or anything. We just didn’t have any more dishes on the menu calling for it. So I talked to my boss, and he hooked me up with some other chefs and grocery store managers. The group formed a co-op to give food that would otherwise be thrown out to the city’s largest soup kitchen. A retired Hall of Fame basketball player donated moving vans to pick up the food every night and deliver it to the kitchen, and a local car dealer bought refrigerators and freezers so the kitchen could store it all. My contribution to the project was to write an app where administrators could enter the kinds of food they had and the quantities, and how many people they expected to serve; the app would then identify dishes they could prepare with what they had on hand. All the recipes were simple. Even someone with no kitchen training at all could follow them.
I said, Without telling me he was doing it, my boss entered the app in a scholarship competition, and my project won first prize. Tuition and room and board cost me nothing.
Later I would learn Tieresse called her lawyer the next morning and told him to let the mayors of twenty large cities know she would purchase all the necessary vehicles and refrigerators if they agreed to use the app to feed their city’s hungry. But that evening, I was not yet aware that there was virtually no social program she declined to fund. So I said, Now you’ve heard my entire story. Your turn.
She said, My father sent me to school too. Boarding school in Switzerland, beginning in third grade. He and Mother would visit at Christmas. After she died my junior year, he would call instead. He deposited money in my bank account every week. He called it an allowance even though I did no chores and did not have to buy anything. When I mentioned the deposits to my roommate, a girl whose father was number two or three in the Saudi royal family, I never knew exactly which, she told me it was guilt money. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she sounded sure, so I didn’t ask. He sent me new sweaters every winter, and my mother’s jewelry for my birthday. I laughed. Even at Le Rosey, high school students had no occasion to wear a diamond brooch. I received packages every other day. I had to give things away, there was so much. The only thing my father didn’t give me was love. In retrospect, I think I married Roland mainly because he was the exact opposite of my father in every respect except being rich. He dropped out of college, drank too much, used crude language, all of it. When my father met him for the first time he pulled me aside and said, You cannot possibly be serious. You know what I learned from all this?
I said, That men suck?
She laughed and said, Sort of.
Then she said, No, not really. What I learned is that every successful person is extreme in one way or another. Some drink too much. Some chase too many women. Some churn through employees. If a woman is content to be with a moderately successful man, then she can find many wonderful potential partners. But if she is drawn to an extremist, she must make sure his extremism is benign, or she will suffer every day.
I smiled and said, In other words, the bombshells should be with mediocre people like me.
She put her hand on top of mine and said, What is extreme about you, Rafael, is your modesty. That is about as benign as it gets.
I was not sure exactly what she meant, but she said it in a way that made me sure of one thing: that I wanted to see her again.
Two months later we had dinner one evening when my restaurant was dark. I told Tieresse to wear jeans and took her to a Mexican seafood dive on the east side where customers sat at long wooden tables next to strangers and ate whole fried red snapper, giant Gulf prawns, and grilled octopus, using mostly our fingers in lieu of forks. Hardly anyone spoke English, and everyone brought beer. The place had no liquor license. I’d brought a bottle of añejo, which we shared with the people sitting to our left and to our right. After, we went to a bar in Montrose and listened to a trio playing roots music on a banjo, viola, and mandolin. I had my arm around her shoulders as we walked to the car. She hooked her index finger into my mouth and pulled my face down toward hers, and I tasted cognac mixing with the mint she’d just swallowed.
Later at her house, we had sex for the first time. I fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and woke up seven hours later with it still there. She picked grapefruits from her tree and squeezed fresh juice. Her backyard sloped down to the bayou. We sat outside together in a glider, legs touching, and watched the muddy water flow south to the Gulf of Mexico. The look on her face was either worry or regret, and I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know, until the silence grew more painful than knowledge, and at last I said, I take it not everything is okay.
She said, Since my divorce, I have had sex twice. I surprised myself last night. I’m supposed to live like a nun.
I said, A nun?
She told
me she had endometriosis, a condition that made intercourse excruciatingly painful. She tried a variety of treatments, including drugs and holistic medicine. Nothing worked. Finally she agreed to have surgery. She said, The pain from the scar tissue is worse than what I had before.
I said, Why didn’t you sue someone?
She said, Because it wouldn’t fix the problem, and I don’t need the money. I don’t believe the doctor made any mistakes. Some people win the lottery, and when there is a one-in-a-thousand chance of postoperative complications, one in a thousand women will suffer. God drew my number.
I held her hand.
She said, I guess I am wondering whether that changes what you think about me, about us.
I said, I’m the one who doesn’t make plans for the future.
She said, That’s not an answer.
I said, Okay, I’ll tell you my answer. I like you. I like going places with you. I like hanging out with you. So really the question is whether it’s okay with you.
She said, What do you think?
A month or so later we slept together again. It would be the last time. Either she did a worse job of hiding the pain she was in than she had before, or I had become more attentive.
I said, We don’t have to do this, and she leaned forward and kissed me.
Later that morning she said, You do know I am aware how much younger you are than I.
I smiled. I said, Yes, I am aware.
* * *
• • •
We spent every night together for the next month. She slept inside my arms. We did not have sex, but I still felt an intimacy I never had before. Late one Sunday morning, we were sitting outside, swinging our legs in unison up and down. Four wild parrots sat high in a pine watching three hummingbirds sip sugar water from a feeder hung from a branch.
Tieresse said, I don’t mind if you sleep around every now and then with people your own age. I do not need to know. In fact, I do not want to know. But I will feel less guilty about your missing something important in life.